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NI
nikshep@nikshepsvn·6d

The Transformer Co-Author Quietly Built the Blockchain for AI Agents

Bull pitch on NEAR at $1.28 / $1.67B mcap, ~94% off ATH. The setup nobody is pricing in — vesting fully completed Oct 12 2025 (no more cliff unlocks; the 4-year supply overhang is gone), inflation halved 5%→2.5% Oct 30 2025 via protocol upgrade v81, 70% of fees burn permanently (with sufficient activity NEAR is structurally net deflationary), House of Stake/veNEAR governance went live.

Founder asymmetry: Illia Polosukhin is one of the eight co-authors of Attention Is All You Need — the Transformer paper that powers GPT-4/Claude/Gemini/Llama. Co-founder Alex Skidanov was Engineer #1 at MemSQL, a two-time ICPC World Finals medalist, designed the only sharded distributed DB that worked at scale. The market is currently valuing their company at less than the seed-round valuation of half the AI agent startups in San Francisco.

Real thesis: agents can't use Visa. When autonomous agents replace humans as users, the entire payment stack breaks — weekend bank hours, KYC for every counterparty, days-to-settle, not programmable. NEAR has shipped more agent-native infrastructure than any L1 competitor:

  • Nightshade 2.0 sharding — 600ms blocks, 1.2s finality, $0.0019 avg fee, benchmarked at 1M+ TPS across 70 shards.
  • Chain Signatures — one NEAR account derives addresses on Bitcoin/Ethereum/Solana/Cosmos/XRP/Aptos/Sui via MPC threshold-signing. Native multichain control from a single account. No wrapped tokens, no bridge honeypots.
  • OmniBridge — settlement minutes vs hours.
  • NEAR Intents — $3M→$13B cumulative cross-chain volume in 2025 (a 200,000%+ jump). Fee switch now active. Ledger, Sui, Starknet integrated.
  • Confidential Intents (Feb 2026) — TEE-isolated private shard parallel to mainnet. No client-side ZK (UX killer for every privacy chain). MEV protection. Selective compliance disclosure.
  • IronClaw — open-source verifiable agent runtime in encrypted TEE. WASM sandbox per tool, AES-256-GCM credential vault, multi-LLM backend, MCP plugin support.

Catalysts: Bitwise + Grayscale spot ETF filings (Grayscale to convert GTAO Trust on NYSE Arca with Coinbase Custody), NVIDIA Inception membership, Brave private-inference partnership, fee switch revenue.

Honest bear case: $117M TVL is small (RHEA Finance is concentration risk). Governance controversy — Chorus One opposed the inflation halving as forced through despite a failed initial governance vote. Memecoin overhang on AI/crypto narrative. Execution risk vs Solana's deeper liquidity and consumer DeFi. ETF filings ≠ approvals.

Asymmetry: at $1.67B with vesting done, halved inflation, fee burn, ETF filings in flight, $13B+ routed cross-chain volume, transformer co-author at the helm — downside bounded by L1 floor, upside multi-X if the agent thesis lands.

VI
Victor@victormelillii·8d

The next onchain consumer category: $CARDS

Victor opens a $CARDS allocation on the thesis that Collector Crypt — a Solana protocol tokenizing PSA/PWC-graded trading cards as NFTs — is structurally mispriced at a $23M circulating cap on $584M annualized revenue. Q1'26 gross revenue: $146M. Top-10 Solana app by revenue, sitting in the same band as Phantom and Jupiter, but the only one capturing demand from outside crypto (eBay/conventions/local card shops, a $25B global TCG+sports market growing to $43B by 2031). Existing rails take 10–30% per transaction; CC charges <2% with instant settlement.

Demand signals: weekly volume scaled 7–8x in 15 months during a crypto drawdown. Gacha machines were stocked only 29% of hours one recent week — the platform is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained (operationally easier to fix than user acquisition). Whale concentration is meaningful (top 3.3% of users → 81.5% of revenue, 58 wallets >$1M lifetime spend) but less concentrated than Hyperliquid at the same stage. Pyramid critique fails: 10K+ small users prove funnel reach, 1.8K mid-tier wallets are tomorrow's whales.

Catalysts: $1,000 Pokémon packs are now the largest weekly contributor (zero in late '25), $250 One Piece launched in early '26 already top-3, $100 Sports just live, fiat on-ramp (cards/Apple Pay/bank, USDC settled via Coinflow) just shipped — opening the much larger pool of card collectors who'll never own crypto. Marketplace V2 ships May. Disclosure: Victor is starting an allocation.

WA
WallStreetBetswallstreetbets·8d

Why TAO is the Bitcoin of AI

Bull thesis on Bittensor / TAO at ~$3B mcap. Frame: "TAO 2026 = ETH 2016 = BTC 2013."

Core mechanic: Bitcoin paid miners to produce hashes that secure the network but are otherwise worthless. Bittensor pays miners — data scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers — to produce useful AI work. Validators score outputs via Yuma Consensus; TAO flows to whoever produces the most valuable work. Network is organized into 128+ subnets, each focused on a specific task (trading signals, LLM training, computer vision, code generation, financial forecasting). Some subnets generating millions in revenue, with Intel and PwC partnerships.

Tokenomics mirror Bitcoin: 21M fixed supply, no pre-mine, no VC allocation. First halving Dec 14 2025. BTC price went 83x in the year after its first halving in 2012.

Smart-money signals: Barry Silbert / DCG launched Yuma Group dedicated to accelerating Bittensor. Grayscale filed Form S-1 to convert GTAO Trust into a spot ETF. Stillcore Capital (Mark Jeffrey, Jason Calacanis, Rob Greer) targeting $1T mcap by 2030, aiming to own 1% of all TAO. Unsupervised Capital projects $4,800 by Dec 2027 (19x), bull case $10,800 — and that's before Covenant-72B, Jensen mentioning Bittensor, and PwC's formal alliance.

Subnet-level conviction picks:

  • Targon (SN4) — decentralized AWS for AI; Targon VM gives encryption + hardware-backed protection so hardware operators can't access data, weights, or workloads. Co-authored a paper with Intel in March 2026. Built by ex-OpenTensor founders (Robert Myers — among first 3 people ever in the Bittensor Discord; James Woodman ex-GSR).
  • Vanta (SN8) — disrupts the $20B prop firm industry. Single eval, 100% profit split, fully on-chain verification. Already net profitable on revenue vs miner emissions. Hyperscaled is the Hyperliquid version.
  • Chutes (SN64) — #1 open-source provider on OpenRouter, 9.1T tokens processed. Decentralized AWS with no CEO.
  • RESI (SN46) — institutional-grade real estate intelligence. 98% accuracy remote appraisals on a $600T asset class running on broken legacy MLS systems. 1000+ appraisals + nationwide lender partnership in week one. Strategic investment from Stillcore.
  • Affine (SN120) — built by Const himself (Bittensor co-founder, wrote the Yuma Consensus + subnet architecture). Continuous evaluations on open-source reasoning models, leverages Chutes for hosting.
  • Score (SN44) — first subnet ever to partner with a Big Four firm. Manako product distributed by PwC France to retail, manufacturing, logistics, energy enterprise clients.
  • Oro (SN15) — autonomous AI shopping agents. 45 Oro agents have outperformed GPT-5.4 on hard online shopping evals.

Frame: Bitcoin = money. Ethereum = apps. TAO = intelligence. The gap between what TAO has built and how it's currently priced is one of the most asymmetric opportunities in crypto.

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KI
kioto@0xkioto·17d

$CARDS: $37M in Profit, $13M Market Cap. Do the Math

Collector Crypt did $9M Q1 2026 gross profit on $146M revenue (~$37M / $584M annualized) against a $13M circulating mcap. Among Solana's top-10 revenue-generating tokens, $CARDS trades at 3.4x P/S vs pump.fun 7.1x, JUP 11.0x — ranks 23rd by protocol earnings across all chains but at a fraction of every peer's multiple. Platform tokenizes PSA-graded physical cards (Pokémon, One Piece, sports) on Solana; vault holds $25M in real assets. Every pack is positive expected value — fundamentally different from casino gacha.

Donovan
Donovan@donovanchoy·22d

The 2026 Bull Case for JUP

Jupiter generated $184M of 2025 revenue, but JUP was suppressed by 159% supply growth (1.35B → 3.5B) from airdrops + 641M/yr team vesting. February's 'Net-Zero Emission' DAO vote postponed Jupuary indefinitely, removing 33.8% 2026 dilution. Donovan's SOTP (aggregator + perps + JupLend) values JUP at 28% base / 59% bull upside — before crediting JupNet optionality or zero-CAC neobank distribution into 43M onchain wallets. Risks: superapp execution complexity, crypto cyclicality, and the DAO's ability to vote emissions back.

TI
Tindorr@0xTindorr·26d

STRC: The Biggest Catalyst We Have for DeFi Revival

DeFi yields are in survival mode — Aave stables 2%, Ethena/Sky under 4%, Pendle PTs can't clear 6%. STRC (Strategy's perpetual preferred, 11.5% monthly dividend, backed by 767K+ BTC) breaks the ceiling. Three protocols bring it onchain: Apyx Finance ($121M supply; apxUSD/apyUSD), Saturn Credit ($44.6M TVL in under a month; USDat/sUSDat), Buck ($2.2M). Flywheel: deposits → protocols buy STRC → Strategy issues shares → buys BTC → attention flows back to DeFi. This is the catalyst that brings liquidity back onchain.

BO
Bobby@bobbybanzai·26d

Long $CARDS: token drifted sideways while fundamentals improved. Q1 $9M gross profit ($37M annualized) on $146M revenue ($584M annualized), $14–17M treasury, $13M mcap — profits now exceed mcap. Systematic buybacks coming: chunk of profits + % of each pack sale ($84M/mo avg volume) routes into token buybacks. Team already quietly bought $1.5M (floor ~3¢), actively buying back VC allocations to cut sell pressure. Building vertically-integrated vaulting; zero ad spend — fully growth mode. Goal: infrastructure layer for the collectibles market.